The Glittering (Sur)Prizes

Conrad Sighed Heavily

Because I'm going to have to explain that title, and how clever and amusing it is, which will automatically suck all the humour and wit out of it, as there is no mosquito that drains both as quickly as Having To Explain A Joke <sighs at the wretchedness of life>.  Art!

Tom Conti in his younger days

     It was a television series that followed the lives of a group of Cambridge undergraduates, which might sound underwhelming were it not for the presence of Tom, who is always a worthy watch.

     We shall now shift abruptly in topic, and switch instead to NASA and their Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where they assemble all their spacecraft and robots and rovers, including the Curiosity one.  Art!

     Why is this important?  Because this is where Mark Rober worked for nine year, including assembly of the Curiosity rover.  The guy is an engineer of some talent, and a sense of curiosity about the world.  Art!

     Here you see him with his devilish invention, the Glitterbomb Mark 3.  Mark had a package stolen from his front porch a couple of years ago, which stoked up his righteous anger to such an extent that he created the Glitterbomb.  Over the years this has been refined and gradually perfected, with the end result still being the same.  Art!

Bombed with glitter

     What he calls 'porch piracy' is a serious problem in South Canada, with 2 million parcels being stolen per annum.  Faced with the temptation of such an object, Mark et al found that 97% of people either actively ignore a parcel, or try to get it to the rightful owner.  That other 3%, though ...

     Anyway, let us take a look at the insanely complex construction and engineering that goes into a GB3.  Art!

The GB3 and the fake earphones box it goes in

     When wrapped in brown paper it looks completely legitimate, and enticing bait for porch pirates.  Let us look at the details in more depth.  Art!

     That small circular hole is covered with one-way foil on the inside, so the camera behind it can record even before the cover is removed.  Sneaky.  Next!

     That cup on the top spins at 1,400 revolutions per minutes, and is loaded with half a pound of glitter.  When it spins the glitter, of course - obviously! - gets everywhere, both on the thief and wherever they open it.  You can't really see it very well in the "Bombed with glitter" photo but the thief's lower body has been covered in small shiny pieces.  Art!

     The underside of the 'handles', which are deliberately designed to look inviting and highly grippable, are coated with an hideously sticky adhesive that makes letting go hard to do (why that sounds like a song lyric).  Then there's the interior.

     There are four phones placed one to each face, meaning that no matter how the GB3 is oriented when the thief opens it, they are going to be in view front and centre.  The phones also allow Team GB3 to track the GB3 down when the thief panics and throws it away in a nearby dumpster, and come pre-loaded with phrases from "Home Alone" such as "Merry Christmas ya filthy animal!", mock police scanner playback and in fact anything Mark feels like ad libbing on the spur of the moment*.  Art!

     Those little bottles contain "Fart Spray" and the cam above them rotates constantly, spraying out Fart Spray and causing an unpleasant stink.  Not only that, Mark strengthens these potions with "Skunk Essence" which makes it even smellier and longer-lasting.  Until yesteryon Your Humble Scribe had no idea that Skunk Essence existed, and still has no idea why it does in the first place.  We're not done yet.  Art!

     Of course the thief will try to put the box back on the GB3, which is where the two small rods that spring out once it has been removed come into play.  You can get a clearer picture of them in the picture with Mark present.  Pretty obviously they stop the box going back on, all the while as it pumps out skunk-scented Fart Spray.

     If you check out Mark's Youtube channel you can see film of these thieves gloating over their stolen goods, and then being bewildered, stunk and scared as a LOUD fifteen-second countdown begins.

     Mark Rober - evil genius fighting on the side of good.

     This is only the lead in to a much, much longer and more complicated story.

<sinister cackle>

Conrad: Still Furiously Angry

O you bet!  At a different Codeword, yet still a Codeword.  The only reason I got the solutions is because I'm brilliant at Codewords.  This is not much consolation to the rest of you duffers out there.  What am I apoplecting at?  I thought you'd never ask!

"LARYNX": I bet this has a Greek root.  Let me just check.  Yup.  From "Larunx".  Also known as the voice box in you humans.  AND AN UNFAIR USAGE OF "Y" AND "X" IN THE SAME WORD.

Ideate a larynx

"ECTODERM":  I think you begin to ideate why Conrad is so very ANGRY.  What the heck is "ectoderm" anyway?  "Derm" tends to mean "skin".  Ah.  "The outer germ layer of an animal embryo", according to my Collins Concise.

     ARE WE NOW EXPERTS IN PAEDIATRIC VETERINARY SCIENCE?

"RASTER": Defined as "A pattern of horizontal scanning lines, especially as those traced by an electron beam on a television screen".  Ah.

     ARE WE NOW EXPERTS IN OBSOLETE                   ELECTRO-MECHANICAL TECHNOLOGY?

     I shall stop typing now before either my sanity or a blood vessel breaks.

"We Have Ways" Podcast 291

Ha!  I remember way back to Podcast 1, when nobody knew if there'd be a Podcast 2, let alone 200.  ANYWAY last night the lads (Al and Jim) had on Professor Joseph Quinn, an Irish academic, with one of their best broadcasts ever, about how the Republic of Ireland and it's citizens got involved in the Second Unpleasantness on the side of Perfidious Albion.  It was pretty much all new to me, and delivered by Prof. Q. in an impeccable Irish accent that made it positively mellifluous.  The subject is both deep and long and, as Al admitted, they only scratched the surface.  I Tweeted both my appreciation and a request for a Part Two.  We shall see!

The Prof, looking rather saturnine

     He mentioned a book - but I dare not go there.  I still haven't been able to shift that copy of Dickens to any of my workmates; Konrad (yes his real name) said he'd studied Dickens back in Poland but didn't want anything to do with my edition of "Nicholas Nickleby".  Philistine.  Of course, if an anonymous person were to Hermes a parcel to his doorstep ...

Finally -

Neither drugs nor book came today, so - fingers crossed that one or both does tomorrow.

*  Some car thieves stole one, then went riding around for hours with the GB3 still live, until Mark sent them a personalised phone message.  They then shot the GB3 so many times it broke.

Frothing Rage And Smug Achievement

SIT BACK DOWN!

For Lo! we are indeed back on the subject of Conrad's Codeword conundrums, for I have yet to fully expound on this apoplexy-inducing hobby.

     Actually, before I do, let's take a closer look at a couple of those words as used by pseuds.  "Conundrum"; where does that one come from?

The archaeopteryx!

     Hmmmm according to my Collins Concise, it originated in the 16th century from no known source, although it's original use was as a term of abuse for pedants (guilty as charged, your honour), changing over time to refer to a riddle or puzzle involving punnery or word play (er, yes, guilty again).  As for "Apoplexy", I bet that one has a Greek root.  Let's check.

Conrad being ragingly apoplectic

     

     Now this one comes from Old French "Apoplexie" which in turn derives from Late Latin and thus from the Greek (told you so!) "Apoplexion", meaning "To have a stroke" - by which we mean the brain aneurism, not rowing in a boat.
     Where was I?  O yes being furiously angry.  That <insert long swear here> Codeword!  

"SAMOSA": HOW is that fair use of language?  HOW!  One does not expect to encounter Indian cooking in a Codeword.  Although the pikers did wilfully use "MACARONI" so they obviously have no sense of fair play.  Art!

They are delicous, mind

"IDEATE": Excuse me?  Ah.  "To form an idea or to conceive".  That's from teh Interwebz because it's not in my Collins Concise, which will allow you to ideate on how incredibly obscure this word is.  Bah!

"STADIA": Which is the plural of "Stadium" and yet ANOTHER word you never hear in conversation nor read in print "O yes I've visited lots of stadia in my ballfoot fandom days" would merely get you funny looks from other fans.

                                             Stadia!

     To prove that I'm not blathering witlessly about nothing of particular import, allow me to adduce evidence.  Art!

Yes, that's Sanjeev Bhaskar.  No, nothing to do with the Codewords.  And stop being so nosy.

     Go through the lot of those and you'll not find any foreign words, nor exotic obscurantae from the sixteenth century.  That's how it's done that's the Chicago way and that how you get Capone properly.   Hence the "Smug Achievement" part of today's title.  We're not done with this subject, not by a long way, but in the interests of mercy we shall halt here for the day.

     Motley!  The antidote to the poison is in the somosas.  Yes, I know there's a hundred of them.  They each contain enough antidote to counteract one per cent of the poison.  Good luck!

     Time, methinks, for a pot of tea.  Excuse Conrad for 5 minutes.

     Thanks for your patience.   Next!

(Not) The Very Model Of A Modern Major-General

As you should surely know by now, Conrad likes to give you occasional reports on what he's reading at that very moment, so you now have a firm knowledge base about the establishment of the Arthurian mythos.  I am now reading "Fighting In Normandy" edited by David C. Isby.  'Ho hum,' I hear you quothing, 'Another book about D-Day'.  Yes, except this one is lots of short articles by Teuton officers; a view from the other side of the hill, as that gossip, fibber and traducer Liddell-Hart put it.  Art!

     One narrative stuck with me, by that unrepentant Nazi Fritz Kramer.  He describes the overwhelming Allied superiority in the air thus: "German military agencies could not judge whether or not they delivered correct and adequate reports on the situation.  It may be that they were having more fun chasing German vehicles along the roads."  Catty miaow!  Then, a little further on, he suddenly throws in a real non sequiteur: "The 'tactics of orders' (Befehlstaktik), outlined in the French General Staff precepts, proved a drawback here as they did during the subsequent course of the war.  Events proved that the 'tactics of military tasks' (Auftragstaktiks) were decidedly superior."  O no they didn't matey; Kramer seems to be labouring under the misapprehension that he won the war, and why he brings in the "French General Staff" when they hadn't fought a battle in 4 years is also rather puzzling.

Ah, that explains a lot.

     Then, after his assertion above, he goes on to list a litany of woe with Teuton formations being shot apart, inextricably mixed up and being pounded by naval gunfire; let's see yer Auftragstaktiks sort that out, hmmm?

"Batwoman" And Yet More Schadenfreude

After last week but one's ratings blip - which nobody can explain - that saw viewing figures RISE!!* after months of steady, relentless falling, we are back in more familiar territory, with another sixteen thousand viewers jumping ship, bringing it down to 532,000.  I think there are only 5 more episodes to run, so we shall see how low it goes - 300,000 viewers, anyone?

     To say that the writers are desperate is to say water is wet.  They are now grasping at reflections that look like they may be straws, with talk of re-casting Kate Kane.  Art!

Close enough

     If you're not up to speed with the soap opera that is this show's behind the scenes story, Ruby Rose quit as Kate Kane a couple of episodes short of the end of Season One.  She gave deliberately vague reasons for leaving, though being an a combination dumpster-fire-cum-train-wreck might be one.  There is no way on this planet that she will come back, so the writers are going to re-cast another actress who is paycheck desperate.

Rube getting into character

     The producers swore on the grave of their holy mothers that they weren't going to do a re-cast.  Obviously they were invented, not born.  Go get a bucket or two of popcorn!

Finally -

From where Conrad sits in his Sekrit Layr, he can see the Post Office van when it draws up on the other side of the road, directly opposite The Mansion.  This is usually a prelude to our Four-Legged Alarm barking her lungs raw as the postie draws near to our letterbox, which is what she's just done.  So, my legal drugs may have arrived, or "American Diaries" by the hilariously droll Sergei Sputnikoff.  Better go see.  If the latter I shall probably sit down and read it all at once, because that's the kind of alien person I am.

     You didn't ask, so I shall just tell you that, yes, I'm enjoying my pot of Darjeeling.

*  Yes, two exclamation marks because it really is that remarkable

Hoop Snakes

We Don't Have Many Snakes In The UK

Conrad has only ever met one person (Rosie) who has seen a snake in the wild here in This Sceptred Isle.  In some countries you have to ensure your footsteps upon the variegated autumnal leaves are loud and shuffling, lest you tread on a snake snoozing upon them.  In Australia one is too busy worrying about the sharks, crocodiles, lethal jellyfish and a million venomous creepy-crawlies to be overly bothered about snakes.  

     ANYWAY, the 'Hoop Snake'.  Art!

Spot the deliberate mistake

     The 'Texas Hoop Snake' is as much of a myth as the Jackalope, and doubtless any herpetologists reading this will shake their head and list all the reasons why.  Still, Conrad would like you to keep that image above in your mind.  In fact - Art!

     We now abruptly change tack, for Lo! we are back with the Darwin Award Winners Of Cinema, and we return to "Prometheus" since it seems to be quite fruitful when you look at it.  Now, recall that the titular ship has taken off and rammed an Engineer spaceship loaded with biological weapons, intent on delivering said payload to Earth, and not in a good way.

     Things do not work out quite as planned, since the shoddily-constructed human vessel disintegrates completely, whereas the far more robust Engineer one slowly falls out of the sky, intact.  This is bad news for survivor Elizabeth Shaw.  Why so?  Because the Engineer ship impacts the planet's surface, still remaining intact, and rolls like a Hoop Snake, right at her.

     Ooops.

An "O dear!" moment

     What is Elizabeth's recourse?  Why to run in exactly the same direction as the Hoop Snake, which comes perilously close to turning her 2-dimensional.  As I put on the Space Opera FB page, Health and Safety Training delivered by ACME and Loonytunes.  Run to the side!  RUN TO THE SIDE!  RUN TO THE S - too late <sighs in despair>.  Elizabeth Shaw: possessing more degrees than a compass and yet not the wit to move fifty feet perpendicularly.  

Volcano-spotting is significantly safer than Giant Hoop Snake Racing

     I think we'll come back to "Prometheus" as it seems there is a rich vein of stupidity to be mined here.

In The Belly Of The Beast

NO!  Nothing about Jonah and whales.  Instead we are whizzing across the Solar System to Mars, where lurks the Perseverance rover, and the 'belly' part of this is because that's where the Ingenuity helicopter is currently being carried.  I apologise for misleading you about Hom. Sap. littering Mars with the protective cover for Ingenuity; in reality it's only just managed to scatter this bit of debris onto the landscape.  Art!

     That rickle of props and struts is the un-deployed helicopter, with which NASA hopes to conquer the planet begin flight testing in April.  NOT on the First, one presumes, as this would lend itself to mockery and assorted japes far too easily.  Being the first helicopter on Mars is a tricky job in itself; the atmosphere is ridiculously thin compared to Earth, so the rotors have to sweep at an incredible rate and Ingenuity's primary design factor has been to be as light as possible.  Art!

     No doubt we'll hear what it sounds like thanks to Perseverance's microphones*, and a flying reconnaissance camera like this will definitely give the mission an advantage over the Martian Rock Snakes.

You May Have Heard About That Business In Suez

Or not, or you may simply be as disinterested in marine shipping and navigation as Conrad is in golf or sporty cars.  FOOLISH PEOPLE! for marine shipping is how This Sceptred Isle keeps going.  That steak on your plate didn't arrive thanks to matter transporters.

     ANYWAY the 'Ever Given' has gone and blocked the Suez Canal completely thanks to mermaids, or sharks with laser beams, or an irate Aquaman.  Art!

     The bow appears to have dug it's way into the canal's embankment, which means it's very definitely stuck, as whatever the ship masses, you need to add the mass of all the cargo.  A figure of 225,000 tons is being bruited about.  As an expert more expert than I explained, if they can't refloat the vessel at high tide, when conditions are easiest, then the canal authorities are going to have to remove cargo.  By helicopter, at a guess.

     ANYWAY that has nothing to do with what I wanted to create a theme about on here, because when I saw this gigantic traffic accident, my horrid mind turned to -

     - because which other punk/post-punk band are more aptly mentioned in this situation?  O that's right, Wonder Wifey's favourite band - Art!

     Ha! Sometimes I amuse even myself.  Of course, since the 'Ever Given' was sailing under a Panamanian registration, there is always -

     And to tie this up before we go completely out to sea, how else can we end but confirm that the 'Ever Given' is, indeed, in -

Dabbling Our Mis-shapen Toe-Talons In The Toxic Trough Of Termagancy

(After "Termagant", or a horrid shrewish woman).  Conrad hopes you will forgive this unusual foray around the edges of South Canadian politics, because it's so madly entertaining, and the crazy train that departed Platform Sanity in November last year is still on it's journey.  You may recall that Sydney Powell, and if Art will put down his Mara Corday calendar for a moment -

     - was peddling all sorts of bampot conspiranoid loonwaffle nonsense last year, so extreme that she was fired by her employer (the Ginger Whinger) and only found out when the press tried to contact him about her.  That's pretty harsh!

     Worse was to come.  Dominion, the traduced manufacturer of voting machines, who had been forced to listen to her smearing their name " - because these machines are directly controlled by Hugo Chavez and Satan, and Adolf Hitler in his secret underground Antarctic base -" though I think they struck that last bit out of her script - sued her for over a billion dollars.  They then had to hire private investigators to track her down, since she fled her home state and tried to hide in order to avoid getting served.

Also fed up, vengeful and with deep pockets

     Ol' Syd is now bleating that no sane person would have believed the tripe she was peddling, it was all bloviated drivel, and she said it live on camera.

     Oooops.   According to more experts more expert than I, all Dominion had to prove their case for defamation was that she way lying (which she just admitted) and that she knew she was lying (again, admitted).  Conrad is getting a couple of buckets of popcorn to follow this thing**.

How many loonwaffles avoided Machine 13?

     And I think we have paddled in poisonous political piffle quite enough.  I declare us done!

*  A cybernetic mosquito, as on that Chemical Brothers track.

**  O schadenfreude, how entertaining you are.

Hot Stuff Indeed

For We Are Going On About Volcanoes Again

And why not?  You can hardly call them boring, can you?  Also they are free, and since they tend to occur away from population centres, you may be able to visit and not get fined £5,000.  Tonight we start with a film that came out at the same time as "Dante's Peak", in one of those strange examples of Hollywood synchronicity that happen when one studio overhears what another's making and decides "That's a hot idea!".  If you'll pardon the pun.  For we are on about -

(They exaggerate)

     For one thing, the fact that there is no way a volcano is ever going to form underneath Los Angeles rather disappointed all the vulcanologists who went to watch it.  For another, there is Stan Olber.  Art!

 Stan with Guilt Sweat

     Because the main villain of the movie is a geological feature, we need another minor villain in human form, and Stan is it.  He doesn't believe The Experts when they warn of a volcano about to sprout rock about, and he probably sneered to boot, and if he had a moustache he'd tweak the ends (painful but dramatic).

     Well well it all goes to hell.  On the subway a train gets stranded and a penitent Stan helps lead rescuers to deliver the passengers from lava.  Except - O noes! the driver is still stuck on the train!  And a tidal wave of lava is about to engulf and incinerate both it and him!

"Ghost Pepper Chilli con carne plays hell on the stomach!"

     Of course Stan takes it upon himself to carry the unconscious driver and WADE THROUGH THE LAVA in order to hurl him to safety.  Stan, you're The Man.  Or were.  Art!

Stan waves an ashy farewell

     Conrad is not convinced you can walk through molten rock when your feet get burned off, though this suspicion is unlikely ever to be tested in it's fulness since most sane people actively avoid swimming in magma.  Couldn't he have thrown seat or cushions or doors onto the lava first to make stepping stones?

     So, next time Tommy Lee Jones tells you not to do a particular thing, DON'T DO THAT PARTICULAR THING.  This has been a public service announcement.

     Okay, motley, time for your skin-flensing and ritual rolling in vindaloo.

Whilst Talking Of Subways

We did not have our remote Team talk today, for the Team Leader was absent, so Conrad did not get to put across his Interesting Fact(s) <sad face> yet people petitioned abjectly to get me to put forth this week's snippets.  Art!

Manhattan Island

     Conrad recited a fact he'd read back in the early Seventies, which held that the island of Manhattan now weighs less than it did before humans arrived, because of all the subways and tunnels and sewers that have been excavated below ground.

     Is this true?  Or even possible?  Well, doing a bit of Google-fu, Your Humble Scribe found a website that did a quick and dirty calculation of how much everything on Manhattan Island weighs.  Thus, in thousands of tons:

Animals: 3

(Including rats)

Humans: 283

Vehicles: 2,400

Road: 4,000

Buildings: 120,000

For a total of 126,686,000 tons.  Art!

     Well, they excavated 1,7000,000 cubic yards of earth when building the subways, and if we guesstimate a cubic yard of earth at one ton -

     It's plausible.  Fancy that!

Looking On The -

NO!  Nothing to do with that Monty Python song, not at all <cross face> now look what you've gone and done!  Teh Interwebz are now in an infinite recursive loop as people drag out their favourite MP sketch and butcher it with bad memory and worse timing.

Roman choir practice

     Right, I hope you're happy now.  No, what I wanted to post was a picture of the beer bottle going cheap at the Co-Op in Babylon-lite, which Your Humble Scribe took as it offered the chance of a cheap pun.  Art!

     Supposedly titled thus to tie into the music scene in Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell, well it merely made Conrad think of The Killers, so there.  Get out of here with your Gay Boy Dragon Show*!

Conrad Is Beyond Mere Anger!

No, this time my Frothing Nitric Ire has given way to <thinks> Pentaborane Fuel Explosion!  Art, if you will.

Toxic, explosive and - green.

     You see, there were other, annoyingly obscure words in the Codeword I tackled after that Crossword with "SINGLETON" as the answer.  O yes.  You want to know what they were?  You don't?  That's unfortunate, you're going to get to know, like it or not.

"MACARONI": Reallly?  I did suspect this from the fact that it ended in "I", which meant either a flower or Italian cooking, the latter being correct.

Makes for a tricky jigsaw

"TRAPEZIUM": YOU WHAT!  YOU <long list of swears redacted> WHAT!  How can this possibly be regarded as anywhere approaching 'fair' you pikers!

     I shall have to go outside for a minute to cool down.  Excuse me.  Also, remove all sharp objects from within my reach, and take the trigger mechanism out of the Atomic Howitzer.

"ASPHYXIA": "Hello?  Ah, excellent.  I finally got through, I've been on hold for  a while, business must be good! That is 'Assassins Incorporated', isn't it?  Yes, yes, we've done business before.  Mister Conrad.  Yes, I was most impressed, vanished without trace and no police interest.  Now, I have another contract for you ..."

Finally -

As if we needed any more proof that Conrad, if he were a stick of rock, would have the word "Dastard" all the way through**.  For Lo! I have been reading and chortling at the BBC's Have Your Say on the ballfoot game, where the technical nuances of people's posts might escape me, yet their motive and spirit do not.  Art!

     This jibe was aimed at a player for The Manchester Are United, whom someone cruelly timed as he befuddledly turned to try and keep the ball in sight; 8 seconds they said.  Which may be an exaggeration.  Or not.  Still maliciously amusing.

"He's the worst manager in the Prime Lager.  You could have a bag of sand and it would have better tactics"

     A reference to the "Manager" of TMAU,  whom came in for a non-stop barrage of insults, lots of them from supporters of TMAU.  "A PE teacher with a cheque-book" was one example.  Glorious stuff!

     And with that, Vulnavia, we are entirely done.  Done done done!

*  Apparently how "Monty Python" translates in Japan

**  It comes from the Old Norse "Daestr" meaning "To be exhausted" and came to mean "dullard" before it's swinish connotations got attached.